The Bigger Picture: Visual Archives and the Smithsonian

Seeing another world, this one behind the Iron Curtain…

Strangely beautiful surveillance photographs shot from an American U-2 spy plane triggered a terrifying nuclear standoff, The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In a new click! photography changes everything entry, Sandra S. Phillips, curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, recounts how information extracted from seemingly abstract images made the Cold War heat up and changed the course of history.